Petition: The Strongest El Niño on Record May Be Forming. This Is No Time to Cut the People Watching It.

On June 11, 2026, NOAA declared that El Niño had formed in the tropical Pacific, and forecasters put the odds at 63 percent that it reaches “very strong” status — a super El Niño — between November and January. Since then the outlook has grown more serious, not less: the consensus across major models now points toward a peak around 3.6°C above average, and several forecasters say this could become the strongest El Niño in the modern record. That is not an abstraction. El Niño transfers an enormous pulse of heat from the Pacific into the atmosphere, reshaping rainfall and storm tracks worldwide, and the strongest events bring drought to some regions and catastrophic flooding to others. Scientists also warn of a public health dimension that gets less attention: beyond heat illness itself, big El Niño years are associated with upticks in pest- and water-borne disease including cholera, typhoid, and malaria. And this one is arriving on top of an already warmer ocean and atmosphere. Please sign the petition urging that America’s weather and climate forecasting capacity be protected and fully funded.

✍  Sign the Petition

The timing is what worries forecasters. For two budget cycles running, the administration has proposed deep cuts to NOAA — roughly a quarter to a third of its budget, elimination of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which coordinates the agency’s climate and weather science, and the closure of climate and weather laboratories and cooperative institutes. It is worth being precise about where this stands, because the picture is genuinely mixed. Congress has pushed back on a bipartisan basis and largely preserved NOAA’s funding so far, holding the agency near $6.1 billion for fiscal 2026 and directing it not to close its laboratories; a similar proposal returned for fiscal 2027. NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs has defended the restructuring, saying internal research would be transferred to operational offices and that it is chiefly extramural research being cut, and some Republican lawmakers have welcomed increases to the National Weather Service budget. Critics counter that the agency has already made what officials described to staff as down payments — hundreds of departures, decommissioned datasets, and disruptions to satellite data during hurricane season. Reasonable people can argue about the right size of a federal agency. The narrower point this petition makes is harder to argue with: the months when a record El Niño peaks are the worst possible moment to be uncertain about who is watching the ocean. One Green Planet has reported on what happens when extreme weather outpaces preparation in climate change claims thousands of lives amid extreme weather events, and the reporting on the budget hearings, including both criticism and the agency’s defense, is available via Inside Climate News.

✍  Sign the Petition Now

Sign These Urgent Petitions!

• Petition: The Ocean Current That Keeps Our Climate Stable Is Weakening
• Petition: A Heat Wave Just Killed Thousands Across Europe
• Petition: One Data Center Drinks What 6,500 Homes Do. States Are Approving Them Anyway.